


A Dream of Tails

by ninemoons42



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Powers, Alternate Universe - Space, Artificial Telepathy, Dream Communication, Dreams, Japanese Mythology & Folklore, Kitsune, Kitsune IN SPACE, M/M, Nogitsune, Not Entirely Human, Seduction, Shapeshifting, Space Flight, Spaceships, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-23
Updated: 2013-03-23
Packaged: 2017-12-06 05:53:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/732178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erik lives and works on spaceships and it is his job to care for people who sleep the long interstellar flights away - and one day he runs into a passenger who takes more than an interest in him. A passenger who is more than just who he seems, who is the bringer of Erik's doom or his salvation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Dream of Tails

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tahariel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tahariel/gifts).



> This is sort of an extrapolation from an askbox fic that I wrote for Tahariel [here](http://tahariels.tumblr.com/post/45439277473/there-is-a-boy-on-this-ship-who-dreams-in-bright-washes): Erik can see dreams in some way or another, and he is seduced in those dreams by a kitsune who just happens to be shaped more or less like Charles Xavier. 
> 
> Happy birthday, Tah!

_Years upon years of waiting. Long nights, longer than winter’s heart, darker than summer’s shadows. The dreams of the world fading away and dying. Voices calling out and then silence, eternal, unyielding._

_These are no times for foxes, no times for mischief and the exchange of favors – favors that come with the sweep of a sleeve and the flash of light glinting off sharp teeth._

_He retreats. Deeper and deeper, into the forgotten places of memory, abandoned homes and rooms left untenanted for lifetimes. Waking only to pass his spark on to each succeeding child, never allowed out, the sense of the hunt and the chase softly slowly withering away, dying on the branch, like petals falling one by one, weeping._

_When these men dream, when these minds look for rest, all they see is the dark of the night, and the faraway pinpricks of distant starlight. Unimaginable distance. Unimaginable time._

_So the fox retreats, and sleeps, burrowing more and more deeply into its makeshift memory-barrow._

*

“Please make sure that you have secured your belongings in the cargo holds,” Erik says, clearly and quietly, as he watches the passengers get ready for the long cryo-sleep. 

This run will take the better part of a year, travelling via one of the older Arcturus star-lanes; it carries new colonists and supplies for one of the Outer Rim stations.

Erik thinks he might have even been born on that same station. Maybe. He has no memories of it. The thing is, he’s preferred to spend his life on the move, and he should really properly be noted as a spacer instead. One spaceship to another, traveling the length and breadth of the Milky Way, starlight runs by Orion and Cygnus. He likes to catch glimpses of Sol and its planets, when the routes take him that way – but he’s never harbored a wish to go back to his species’ point of origin.

He shares that with this group of people, who have been traveling away from Earth if the manifests are any indication. Sleep and years falling away, lives passed in transit.

He at least has chosen to be on this particular starbound trajectory.

Someone brushes past him, and murmurs apologies. “Excuse me,” the boy says, and he’s an oddity, all right, in this shapeless mass of men and women and children with interchangeable faces worn from too much travel.

Bright blue eyes, vivid with life, and seeming to take everything in. Piercing like starlight. 

Erik shakes the thought of that face off, and goes back to his duties. Some of the children have to be calmed down before they can be coaxed into their pods, but for the most part there’s little trouble. Maybe these families know something of stellar transit; they are patient and quiet and docile, one face after another going slack as they are surrounded by protective cold and protective sleep.

By chance or accident the boy with the blue eyes is the last passenger on the manifest, the last one that Erik has to see to before they can truly consider this journey to be underway.

“Hello again,” Erik says. It doesn’t hurt to be polite. “Is it your first flight?”

“In a manner of speaking,” the boy says, sweet and formal and strange layers of accents curling around his syllables. “I think that I might have been born on a moon of some kind. I don’t know where my family comes from. All I know is moving, wandering from star system to star system.”

Erik tries a smile, and knows that it’s a tentative one at best. He’s not used to it. “I see. Sounds familiar.”

“This is the first time I’ve had to be put in cryo-sleep, though.” The boy blushes, suddenly, bright and unexpected, and the freckles on his face are like stellar patterns in their own right, uncharted.

“There’s nothing to it,” Erik says. “Just – lie back, take a deep breath, and keep breathing until you fall asleep. Easy. Painless. Practically harmless. Maybe it makes people dream, but that is my function here. I can calm people down if they need it.”

“How?”

“Drugs, sometimes. Mostly they just need reassuring: they just need to remember that their families are still here, that no one has stolen their belongings, that we’re on course.”

“You do seem to know this forwards and backwards,” the boy says, with quiet wonder.

“I should hope so. I’ve been doing this for a while.” Erik nods at the last unoccupied pod. “You ready to go in?”

“I think so,” the boy says. Erik watches him close his eyes and draw a deep breath, as though steeling himself for battle. “You said it’s easy.”

“Easy as a breath or two.”

“Okay. I’ll trust you.” And with a nimbleness that startles Erik and takes his breath away, the boy swings easily into the capsule-shaped bunk, and reaches up for the lid that will seal him in. “Good night, I believe that’s what people say?”

Erik blinks. “Ah. Yes, they do say that. Good night. I’ll come by in a month or so to check on your dreams.”

“Yes, please,” the boy says, and he smiles and closes his eyes and his is a face that Erik sees even after the pod’s protective glass turns opaque, hiding that tiny smile from view.

A smile full of – something. Unreadable. Unknown. Something Erik has never seen before.

*

There is a protocol in place for passengers in cryo-sleep: they are to be checked on at definite intervals, and they are to be reassured as needed, and their dreams are to be left strictly alone for the most part. Dreams are private thoughts and private desires and the subconscious made manifest, and they belong to their dreamers and creators alone.

So Erik tells himself, and sometimes that is all that stands between him and the need to watch the blue-eyed boy’s dreams.

A need, because the first time he’d donned the familiar visor with its clear orange glass and stood over that cryo-pod with its strange occupant, he’d been plunged into strange visions as soon as he’d activated the neurolink: dreams of a mansion with stained glass in the windows and unimaginably old paintings everywhere, dreams where the floors were covered in strange rich silks in colors that Erik could never have imagined. Dreams of piercing whistling song, and dreams of the wind and the sounds of distant crying.

Now he stands over the sleeping boy, over the oblivious boy, and has to clench his hands into fists. Bright shard of pain in his skin, flash of blood against his palm, and it grounds him in himself, in the rules that govern his existence and protect the people in his care.

He walks away, trying to talk some sense into his own mind, trying to will himself towards some kind of resolution, and never sees that in the cryo-pod the sleeping boy curls up and smiles and reaches out in his direction.

*

_Something is pulling it from his sleep, from its deep sleep and the dreams of kits and sleeves and many tails. A familiar savor. A welcome drag._

_Once, the fox rouses from its slumber, and peers out through the boy. Curiosity is the curse and the blessing of a fox. It has gotten in trouble in the past, trouble that had nearly cost it a life or two._

_But this curiosity is rewarded. The boy’s senses show him the face of a man. Ascetic, now, or so it seems, because no one has thought to dig in. There are depths to this man, strange places, hidden even to his own mind. Desire without end, need without words, desperation and yearning._

_What a find! What a gift! Perhaps the dreams of drought and void have brought the fox to this at last. An opportunity, something new, never before encountered._

_The fox wakes and spins its plans, spins its thoughts, and dreams of the boy and of the man, of teeth and of tails._

*

Three or four months into the voyage, Erik’s resolve slips.

It’s something of a condition of his, that he finds himself wandering in corridors when he is only half-aware of what he is doing. Old human wisdom does not rule out the existence of people who can seemingly function normally when what they are actually doing is sleeping. He already knows that the signs of this have already been noted in his own psychological profile, which means that his employer is aware of what he does, and is willing to keep him on in any case.

So maybe he’s not really doing anything wrong, but he does know that he’s likely not doing something right.

Because he finds himself looking down at the boy with the blue eyes, unaware, lost in sleep.

A spark of something that he might be able to define as fear prickles heavily, insistently, in his skin the longer he stares, the longer he finds himself tracing the outlines of the sleeping boy’s face through the pod’s glass.

Once, he comes back to himself to look down at the boy and he nearly yells in fright when he notices that the boy’s hand is touching the glass, that the boy seems to be reaching out to him as he is reaching out.

Gravity, strangeness, he doesn’t have a name for what is happening to him, and Erik opts for the coward’s way out: he avoids the pod over the next few months, even when the regulations state that he must check up on its occupant as he does with all the passengers under his care.

Now, he cannot bear to look at the pod, and now, he keeps finding himself facing it, unwilling, trembling, torn up by his fear and his thoughts, composed of things that he cannot name.

*

Normally he dreams independently of the men and women and children sharing the ship with him, but now Erik finds himself waking up from the phantom sensations of the boy’s touch: a touch that burns through to the very heart of him.

He’s willing and he’s unwilling to lay himself out for that touch. 

He knows what it means, and he doesn’t know what it is. 

He’s afraid of the boy, and he craves him, and the thought of the boy grips him in steel and gravity and doesn’t let him breathe.

In his dreams, the boy is more than just the form that he can see sleeping in cold stasis: the boy is so much more powerful, and he is a strange thing, hair gone completely silvery-white, matching the sweep of his tails. 

Five tails, limned in unknown light. 

*

_The fox sings: Come closer, come closer, give me your hand, give me your heart._

*

A few weeks out from their destination, Erik stares at himself in a window near his quarters and doesn’t recognize the face that peers back out at him: deep lines. Silver hair. Vitality and strength have fled him and left him scarred and afraid and skittish. Querulous movements, the instinctive hunch of his shoulders, like a prey animal trying to make itself smaller so as to hide from whatever is in pursuit.

There are no predators on board.

Only the boy.

*

He’s not surprised when he steels himself for the final checks on his sleeping passengers before he must wake them all up, and comes to the boy last of all, and finds him wide awake and aware.

“You did this to me,” Erik says, weakly. “You’ve brought me to this. What have you done?”

The boy smiles, and now he sees what he had never noticed before: now he sees that the boy’s teeth are sharp and pointed. “I have done what I must do in order to survive.”

“By killing me.”

“Oh, not that way,” the boy laughs. His voice is suddenly full of strange depths, strange powers. “I have so many other plans for someone like you, if you’ll let me stay with you, if you’ll let me tie my cords around you.”

Erik recoils. “And why would I do that?”

The boy curls up from the cryo-pod, and Erik’s breath catches in his throat, for the boy is beautiful and dangerous and desirable. His jumpsuit hangs open, exposing pale skin and blue veins; he looks so fragile.

Erik knows he is not that at all.

“I think you would do what I asked you, if I asked you the right way,” the boy purrs. “If I asked you to join with me, here and now, you’d say yes. I might have to wait, but you’d say yes. I know you’ve wanted me. I know you’ve spent yourself to thoughts of me. Won’t you let me share in that? Won’t you let me have something like that?”

Erik shakes his head, shivering. “I – no – ”

“No? Oh. That’s a pity. Am I not what you have been falling for, again and again?”

Even as he voices the denial he knows it rings hollow and false. “No – not you – ”

The boy pouts and falls gracefully back into the pod, and turns his back on Erik. “Go away then. Leave me here.” A voice full of old hurt, old resignation.

“You’re just trying to trick me,” Erik says.

“Think what you want. I only know that I am doing what I must to survive. And this body and this mind are young and full of life, but not even that can sustain me.”

 _“What are you,”_ Erik breathes.

“Now you’re interested,” the boy growls. “Too late. Go away.”

“No,” Erik says, and he walks around to the pod controls and keys in an override sequence – knowledge he should not have – and then, cursing himself with every movement, he climbs into the pod after the boy.

It’s a tight fit. They are touching everywhere.

Erik is drowning in the boy, and the sensation intensifies when he closes his eyes.

“So you’re here,” the boy whispers against his throat.

Erik shivers violently and nods.

“Why?”

“Need,” is all Erik can say.

There is a long silence.

Erik opens his eyes, just in time to catch a glimpse of a sharp sliver of a smile, points of silver in the semidarkness of the pod, and then – soft wet warmth against his mouth, lapping at him, insistent. Hands on his body, powerful sparking fire kindling within him, utterly consuming.

*

_Mine, mine, mine, is the fox’s song, that resonates now in the stars._

**end**


End file.
